A materialist turn in the humanities and social sciences has
revitalized work in feminism, science and technology studies, critical
social theory and phenomenology. But what of 'race' thinking from a
materialist standpoint? Can a materialist ontology of race transform
anti-racist politics?

A politics of representation and changing the conditions of
representation has ostensibly become an anti-racist orthodoxy. How
many times have we repeated the mantra of race as a social and
discursive construct and still be left with a feeling that it fails to
tell the whole story. And discourses of post-race are found to be
wanting for their potential to erase why race matters.

While the association of phenotypical differences with cultural
categories is a socially and historically contingent process, we
continue to be confronted by the irreducibility of race. From the
perspective of materiality, embodied difference is not the end point
which has to be discursively negotiated or dissolved. Rather,
difference is a real point of departure and struggle, in order to
contest the constitution of race on the very ground of everyday life.

The second journal issue of darkmatter seeks to open up the question
of the material facticity of race - possible topics of interest: